Inside story... A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

I wrote Far Rockaway in part because I could not get my two children to plough through what they saw as the thick shell of heavy, antiquated prose encasing Treasure Island and Kidnapped to get to the stories within. The good news is that fine Story will always out, one way or another: that supposedly impenetrable prose really worked for them when read aloud, and they listened happily to the audiobooks on two long journeys to the Outer Hebrides. Heresy to say it in these pages, probably, but I think Story, Vitamin S, is more important than actual reading…

The other reason I wrote it was because I'd been lucky enough to chair a discussion with Alan Moore where he talked about his theory about Idea Space, a separate and universally accessible place in which mental events occur. It got me thinking about where stories and their character might go to exist outside us. This allowed me not only to shamelessly steal his cleverer idea and apply it to a kind of Story Space in which half the book occurs, but to remix and mash up some of the characters from classic adventures and hopefully share them with a new audience. Who might even then go back and discover them in the original.

The following 10 classics are the ones responsible for getting me into trouble with this whole storytelling thing in the first place. I guarantee they are chock-full of Vitamin S.

The adventures of Tintin were my gateway drug to the deeper addiction to all books and stories that came after. They also gave me a love of visual storytelling in general and clean-lined illustration in particular. The physical comedy – usually involving Captain Haddock or Cuthbert Calculus – is superb and something the written word alone could not convey. And, of course, they introduced me to pirates …

… speaking of whom: Long John Silver. Stevenson (who after all wrote that great novel about split personality, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is really good at balancing light and shade in his characters, making them three dimensional and real. Both books are rattling good adventures, full of jeopardy and betrayals. In Treasure Island, Silver is a villain who's almost a hero, and in Kidnapped, the swordsman Alan Breck Stewart is a hero who's pretty close to a villain, if not an actual murderer. And when I finished my first book, Stoneheart, I realised the character of the Gunner has a lot of Alan Breck's DNA in him …

This book took me to India for the first time without leaving the comfort of my chair. I was immediately hooked by the teeming world of the Grand Trunk Road, the bazaars, the busy cantonments and towns and the remote hill stations. More than that I was entranced by Kimball O'Hara, the worldly street urchin who has a foot on both sides of the racial divide of colonial India and slips from one to the other like quicksilver, but not, in the end, without cost. It's an exciting story of espionage and skullduggery, but more than that it's a story about identity and choice. Kim's liking for intrigue and adventure is tempered by his love for the Llama he serves, and in the end he … well, read the book.

These two books are history and fantasy told in a series of linked short stories: Puck, "the oldest Old Thing in England", appears to two children and magics characters from the past to bring history alive by showing it from an eyewitness's point of view. These books gave me a sense of how the past is always present in a landscape, just waiting to be tapped into. (Bonus features: really great poems between the chapters, including If … and Cold Iron.)

The early part of King Arthur's life told in a whimsical fashion and set in a quirky vision of Merrie Englande that's underpinned by a deep understanding of medieval history. The boy Wart is befriended and tutored by Merlin, who is – eccentrically – living backwards in time. Merlin uses magic to shapeshift the boy into various creatures, allowing him to learn as he experiences the adventures that follow. In fact eccentricity is the seductive hallmark of the whole book, and though you come for the story and the magic, you find – as with the previous two books – that you've stayed for the history.

Orcs. Sorcerers. Dwarves. Elves. Hobbits. Daring, cowardice, self-sacrifice, swordplay, unlikely friendships and ultimate heroism. What's not to like? Just as the previous three books rest on a strong footing of real history, the Tolkien world works because it sits on a firm foundation of Old English and Norse mythology. Some "high fantasy" novels stumble because the worlds don't make sense and the names of the characters get wildly out of control. Not so with Tolkien: not just a great adventure saga, LOTR has a proper substructure which makes it a dynamic and engaging retelling of the old stories.

As a teenager I fell in love with Scout Finch at first read and have felt that way ever since. The book actually made me a bit less of a jerk because it provoked and seduced me into seeing the world through other people's eyes – the first time I remember a story doing that to me. As a father I often wish I could be more like Atticus Finch, an ambition I fail miserably to come close to achieving. You can't read this book and not be outraged by injustice and prejudice, nor can you fail to understand both sides of the court-case it swings around. If Tintin was my gateway into children's books, this was the portal into adult reading. It made me grow up.